John D. MacDonald

The Fraud That Paid Off

At eleven-thirty in the morning, Johnny Brewer was at last able to take a ten-minute break after three hours of ulcer-breeding activity. He sauntered into the Production Manager’s office, collapsed loosely into a chair and gave Kathie Morrison, Proctor’s redheaded secretary, a weak smile.

“Get it straightened out?” Kathie asked. He nodded. “How did it happen?” She was a smallish girl with a brisk manner and wise gray Irish eyes.

“Watson in the stock room missed a reorder point. He transposed stock numbers when he reordered. Purchasing didn’t catch it. So for lack of a supply of lousy little die castings only so big, this vast industrial enterprise would have had to shut down the whole line tomorrow afternoon.”

“Johnny,” she said severely, “I told you about Watson.”

“He’s a nice guy.”

“He’s a lovely guy. He knows more limericks than anybody. But as I told you, life will be easier for you if you get in there every once in a while with a components list and take a visual inventory.”

“The life of a production chaser is grim,” Johnny said. “And perhaps I shall start listening to you, girl.”

Proctor came in, taking big steps, moving fast. “All set?” he barked.

Johnny got up. “They’ll ship a hundred units air express. We’ll get ’em at three in the afternoon tomorrow. They’ll follow up with a regular shipment.”

Proctor scowled and did some mental arithmetic. “Two-hour shutdown?”

“No. I found eighteen units up in design. And Inspection sidelined twenty completed assemblies; so I told Joe to strip the units out of those and return them to stock. We’ll make out.”

Proctor sighed. He nodded curtly at Johnny Brewer. “Good work,” he said and disappeared into his own office.

“That,” Kathie said with pride in her eyes, “is something he seldom says.”

“My day is made. Now if only...”

Since she knew immediately what Johnny was thinking about, the light of warmth and pride faded quickly from Kathie’s eyes. She turned back to her work, and muttered, “Good luck.”

“No law against dreaming,” Johnny said, and walked out. Johnny Brewer’s endless efforts to make a date with The Princess were well known and frequently commented upon throughout the big plant of the Kallston Corporation. The Princess, Miss Virginia Conway, was secretary to the Plant Manager, highest resident brass at the plant. In looks she was faintly reminiscent of Grace Kelly, with Kelly’s same air of cool, polite, delicious unattainability. When an errand brought her down to the production floor, she did not look out of place — she made the entire production floor look out of place. Johnny’s varied and diligent efforts had thus far been rewarded by a frostiness of blue eyes, a tiny, pitying smile.

After Johnny left the office, Kathie balanced her chin on a small capable fist and scowled. She had tried once to tell Johnny that Virginia had all the ripe, rich warmth of a servo-mechanism, but had only succeeded in angering him. Johnny was deeply smitten, and Kathie knew he deserved better. But Johnny was not very bright about people. She scowled and thought and plotted.

Four days later Johnny was walking down the corridor of the main office building, and he saw Virginia Conway leaning against a water fountain, drinking with the delicate daintiness of a cat. Somehow she always made him think of a dish of vanilla ice cream. He braced himself for the usual question he intended to ask her.

She straightened up and saw him and, shockingly, gave him a wide, warm, direct smile, squinching her eyes deliciously. “Hello, Johnny,” she said in her soft and wonderful voice.

It stopped him dead in his tracks. The carefully planned phrases fled his mind. He spoke awkwardly to her. Three minutes later he was alone in the corridor. And he was obligated to pick Virginia up at her home at seven on Saturday night. He floated down the corridor, head bumping the ceiling lightly, wearing a smile seven inches broader than his mouth.

It was the super-extra-special evening, but not the economy size. Johnny Brewer had selected the places carefully. Dinner was in a place where a good half of the dishes were carried in on fire. The Princess, in a strapless white dress, with creamy bare shoulders, with eyes and lips and spun gold hair, was so excessively lovely that she had a tendency to blur before his eyes. Johnny sensed that he was talking too much, and he had no coherent idea of what he was saying, but it seemed to be going over well. Her careful laughter was like golden bells.

Later, in another place, she sat close beside him on a banquette and listened to a pastel piano, and her fingers, below the table top, were interlaced delightfully with his.

She leaned her golden head close to him and, with a slant of mocking eyes, said, “You’ve kept it a very good secret, you know.”

“I have no secrets.”

“Johnny, I hold the job I have because I never give out confidential information. So you don’t have to worry that I know. I’ll never tell anyone until you’re ready to let it be known.”

“I think I fell off at one of those curves back there.”

Again the sound of the golden bells. And her hand tightened on his. “You can trust me, really. I won’t be like that Morrison girl. When she found out by accident, she blabbed.”

“Kathie blabbed?” he said blankly.

“Johnny, I think you’re very brave. As the favorite nephew of the Chairman of the Board, you could have come in here at least as Assistant Plant Manager. But you took such a humble little job.” She squeezed his hand again.

Johnny stared at the Princess. There seemed to be a little green in the blue of her eyes. The green of money. And he noticed for the very first time that her lips were a bit thin, her mouth a little too small, her upper lip too long.

He stared at her. “Wow!” he said softly. He shook his head. He very carefully disengaged his hand from hers. “My!” he said and stopped. He was incapable of further speech and he felt that he had been playing a delectable game of blindman’s buff. The trouble was he’d taken off the handkerchief and found himself on the brink of a remarkably pitiless chasm.

On Monday Johnny Brewer walked into Proctor’s outer office, walked with long, limber stride. He leaned over Kathie’s desk and said, between clenched teeth, “I have one uncle. He is a Chief Petty Officer in the Navy. He retires next year.”

Kathie blushed so thoroughly that her freckles became momentarily invisible. “I just thought it would...”

“It did. Thirty-eight bucks I wasted on that evening.” He straightened up, towering over her. “You’ve got to stop meddling.”

Gray eyes filled with quick tears. “Johnny, I just thought...”

“Maybe you ought to stop thinking, too. I’d find out about Watson’s mistakes in my own way, sooner or later. And about her in my own way, too.”

“But you take so long!” she wailed.

“There’s one way I can keep you in line, girl,” he said thoughtfully, noting how generous was her mouth, how rounded her arms, how pleasantly short her upper lip. “I’ll spend so much time with you every evening that you won’t have a chance to dream up little lessons for me. Okay?”

Kathie stared at him, her eyes round. “My goodness, it didn’t take long for you to get around to that!” And. realizing at once how thoroughly her choice of words had given her away, she blushed with more abandon than before. And Johnny Brewer stood over her and laughed, deftly fielded the stapler she threw at his head, and kissed her once before Mr. Proctor arrived. He also kissed her again that evening on their way back from a place that had no pastel piano but some splendidly sentimental records on the jukebox.

Content

John D. MacDonald
The Fraud That Paid Off